There are moments in life when you look at yourself and you think, “Holy Cheese Curds, how did it come to this?” It actually takes a lot for me to invoke the holiness of cheese curds. I’m in an MFA program for cheese curd’s sake. My hopes are pinned on the fact that I’ll publish a novel in order to have enough street cred to teach night classes at an obscure community college, whilst probably working part-time at some Banana Republic located in the same North Dakota town.
I readily accept that. So for me to look at my life and question direction I need quite the push.
But things came to that point this afternoon.
I’ve generally kept one of my jobs in Chicago under wraps because… To be quite honest I didn’t know if it would ever qualify as something you put on a resume. I joined this writing group last August and then was hired by the boss last November to do HR and hiring for other writers. The company basically started last May and has been moving steadily toward… I don’t know what for the past year.
The goal is to develop a web sitcom based around characters in mascot costumes. It’s actually a hysterical concept and the writers have done a good job creating some characters who are really bizarre and a lot of fun. Over the past few months I’ve moved from HR manager to head script editor to now head of production. All of these titles mean absolutely nothing, but my boss likes to throw them around in order to make me feel important, so that, for instance, when we are redrafting scripts about…say how a man dressed as a fox is running for political office and is invoking the rivalry of a man dressed as a rabbit, who is angry because said fox has beat him to the publication of an expose on Rutherford B. Hayes, I have the willpower to not walk out of the room and apply for certification as a paralegal.
Well, over the past couple months we’ve made some major headway in script development and built a pretty solid set of writers who have been with us for about 6 months. It’s been my motivation all spring to shoot some actual video so that we actually have some recruitment tools when we invite people to interviews.
The first shoot I planned my boss backed out of. There were some snafus with costume rental and he didn’t think we were ready to actually shoot anything, so we had to cancel everything. I was pretty miffed, told him such and ended up with a raise and the green light to develop promotional videos for the eventual episodes that we are going to shoot.
Today I got my wish.
I organized a shoot and got about five of the other writers to jump on the bandwagon with me.
It was somewhere between dressing my boss in a rabbit costume and discussing the logistics of pushing him on a skateboard across uneven pavement that I began to question my life.
I thought, “Tedd…Okay, you have a degree from a top 20 University and are pursuing a master’s at another top 30 university.” And I answered myself, “Yes.” Then myself continued to say, “Well… Why are you dressing a man in a rabbit costume and shooting a scene about him skateboarding across a seedy alleyway while a group of kids observe and comment on such.”
This time I couldn’t really answer myself.
It was about this time that - I can’t even make this up - a guy about my age, driving a new BMW with a Notre Dame sticker across his back windshield pulled into the garage next door to where we were shooting.
I looked for a brief moment between the Beemer and the rabbit and I thought for a second about the whole situation. Whether I could just trade in my skateboard for a BMW. And I probably could.
But then, of course, there is the question of who will support the rabbit as he flies across the alleyway in the suit with no eyes. Someone has to hold his legs, of course, and tug him along so that the camera operator can get the close-up as he brandishes a bottle of alcohol and waves at the kids in the alleyway. Someone has to do that.
And I can’t trust that task to just anyone.
So we finished the shoot and went inside. That sentence, of course, skips over the other 1.5 hours we spent in the 80 degree heat while I filmed close-ups and wide shots of the guys, who were playing teenagers, pretending to pass around a cigarette. “Are we done yet?!” they moaned. “You haven’t done video shoots before, have you?” I asked.
So we get inside and my boss hooked the video up to the TV. We started the video just as the other writers who hadn’t participated in the shoot walked into the room and took seats. The first clip that came up happened to be the shot of my boss flying across the alley on the skateboard.
The shot looks so bizarre and awkward that the whole room broke out into laughter. And in-between thinking about how awful the sound is going to be and how we should have gotten more coverage on the rabbit and how I should have gotten a close-up of Teenager #3 because his reaction to the other two Teenagers was important in one particular line of dialogue and how the light in the one shot doesn’t match the others, I thought that maybe it’ll turn out all right. But mostly I was relieved someone had held the rabbit’s legs; because at that moment my boss divulged that he had two fused vertebrae and a fall in the rabbit costume could have resulted in a trip to the ER.
“Holy cheese curds,” I thought, “I’m glad I didn’t go with my original concept to have the rabbit on a unicycle.”
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